Author, King, and Christ in Shakespeare’s Histories

Abstract

By the time he completed Henry V in 1599, Shakespeare had written or co-written two four-part sequences of English history plays. Taken together, these two tetralogies formed a coherent historical narrative, a cycle. No other dramatist for the Elizabethan public theaters had ever attempted such a cycle; none had even written more than a two-part sequence of plays. The only significant analogue to Shakespeare’s achievement were the miracle plays that in earlier times had been performed in towns such as York and Chester during the festival of Corpus Christi. These cycles, dozens of plays apiece, were religious drama, telling the history of the world from the Creation to the Last Judgment. They were also Catholic drama, and the Protestant Church eventually shut them down. But the Corpus Christi cycles lasted long enough for Shakespeare, his fellow actors, and members of his audience to have been able to witness them.¹ Why did Shakespeare take the unprecedented step of imitating or emulating these old religious plays with a commercial theatrical cycle of his own?²

Why then begin, great King! ascend Thy Throne, And thence proceed, to act Thy Passion.

(Robert Herrick, ‘Good Friday: Rex Tragicus, or Christ going to his Cross,’ 1647)